Rethinking Fredegar’s Prologue

Contrary to what has often been assumed, the prologue to the Chronicle of Fredegar was a carefully thought-out and deliberate statement of purpose. Supposed misunderstandings of the Chronicle of Jerome in the prologue - in particular the difficult opening passage - have been misinterpreted by previous scholars. Rather than claiming to have translated the chronicles that he used as sources, Fredegar denied having done so. The chief purpose of the prologue was to establish that Fredegar had abridged, but otherwise not materially altered, his source texts. This in turn served to validate the interpolations that he made to those texts.